How do we know what we know?
I found this to be a startling question when I was first asked it. It made me pause as I tried to grapple with the impossibility of answering it, succinctly or otherwise. Its so broad and so specific all at once, and the question plunges me straight into a reflective place.
The answer ‘it depends’ hovers in the space after the question, and yet to leave it there is to miss an opportunity to deepen our understanding. Like all good questions it leads to more questions.
I know my name, I know what I like to eat, I know where I live, I know about psychotherapy and music and where I stand politically and spiritually.
Those aspects of knowing make up me, myself and I know them in different ways, intuitively, concretely, experientially, evidentially – and somethings I just know and cannot explain how. Like what the colour red is like.
If I want to know what the weather is like I have a number of useful and reliable sources of information. I can look up a weather forecast (thinking), I can ask a trusted person (secondary evidence), I can know what the weather is usually like in January (knowing from experience), I could determine to learn more about cloud patterns (knowledge from education) or I can look out of the window (concrete here and now experience). There’s also an intuitive knowing that people who spend a lot of time outdoors have, the farmer who senses rain, or snow or sunshine and plans their day accordingly, regardless of what the forecast might say.
I can know what I know about weather in many ways I can succinctly describe.
How do I know what the colour red is? How would I describe it to someone who had never experienced the colour red? I would find that a challenge and yet I am confident that I could pick out the colour red from a spectrum of colours given I am not colour blind.
That’s a different kind of knowing. A collective knowing maybe, a consensus of opinion across society that this is red. Someone who is colour blind has to take this on trust, not being able to back up the consensus knowledge with concrete physical experience.
Therapeutically how we know what we know touches on many aspects of relationship and we can get disconnected from what we know in so many ways.
Which brings us to therapy.
How we know what we know touches on many aspects of relationship, to self, others and the world.
Do we trust our senses to deliver accurate information, or have we learnt not to? Do we trust our gut intuition about things, or have we lost that sense as an important source of information? Do we trust ourselves to make good decisions or have we had too many challenging consequences that have overwhelmed our capacity to trust ourselves?
The questions only get bigger when we consider trust in others, in the reliability of information, systems, governments. And then there is , pre-cognition, prescience, hindsight, group think, the collective narratives both conscious and unconscious, visions, dreams, imagination.
Trust, reliability, honesty, clarity, intention, perception, intuition are a few of the things we might consider in how we know what we know
All of this knowing and what we have learnt from others and from experience about its value and reliability is at play in the therapeutic relationship. All of it subject to bias, to preconceived ideas, to discounting, to misinterpretation. All of it a potential gateway to authentic encounter and therapeutic growth and change.
Sometimes therapy is about reconnecting to multiple sources of knowing, reassigning their relative reliability and importance, or maybe even establishing the connection to begin with and then learning how to integrate this information in a way that supports us to have a full life.